With the advent of technology, computer networks are becoming an essential aspect of any organization's office and homes. More so with increasing size of these networks, maintenance of networking devices like routers and switches also becomes equally critical for service providers and vendors.
The service providers provide maintenance of the networking devices by monitoring the health and trying to trouble-shoot or diagnose the faults in the networking devices. Usually, a customer calls a technical support group where a technical support engineer first tries to troubleshoot the problem in the networking device by providing technical resolution(s) to the customer. The customer may interact with the technical support engineer via a telephone, web messaging or through emails. These technical resolutions may even use public networks like the Internet for sharing the device information. However, if the technical support engineer fails to resolve the problem from remote assistance, he visits the customer's site for hands-on troubleshooting. This increases the overall time to repair a device and usually the customer gets irritated with this lengthy and somewhat disruptive process.
In other techniques service providers or vendors remotely monitor the networking devices to retrieve specific data from these networking devices, and remotely initiate troubleshooting action(s) to resolve the problem. The retrieved data from the networking devices is transferred from the customer's network to backend servers at the vendor's network over the Internet. However, these technical resolutions involving exchange of data generally invoke security concerns like eavesdropping. These security concerns become critical especially when the data that is transferred over the Internet is confidential and proprietary. Although various security techniques like data encryption are deployed, they are not completely secure.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need of a solution that allows customers to send data from their networked devices to the backend server securely even when transmitting over a public network.